Object Women: A history of women in photography

Object Women is the first sustained attempt to use the social media platform Instagram for dedicated art-historical enquiry.

The woman as image, as icon, as object: the history of photography is replete with female figures who hover between personhood and objecthood, animacy and inanimacy. However, photography’s object women are also women who object, resisting their objectification in unexpected ways.

Developed by Dr Alix Beeston, with support from the School, the Wales Arts Review, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the project explored the representation of women and girls in photography through a series of daily posts from March to May 2018.

It reached over 1,000 followers during its run and is now available as an online archive on Instagram.